Pathways

Diary

We had bonded over a mutual friend.  Well, maybe bonded isn't exactly the right word.  We had met online, after all, and through Manhunt (essentially a seedy internet gay bar, for those of you not familiar).  Nevertheless, he knew Andy, the Andy of the past five years, the Andy of whom i have barely any knowledge at all.  So, i looked past the fact that the guy was unfortunate enough to be named Gene and was a little league pro wrestler.  I tolerated his cocky attitude too.  Having gotten his number wrong on my first attempt at real life contact I went back online to double check if i had the right digits.  This made him defensive and he quickly put me down for my egregious mistake.  "Learn how to dial a phone?", he answered when I finally got through.  The conversation continued its descent into stereotypical banality.  "The only thing gay about me is that i suck dick," he boasted in his conspicuously macho growl.  Nothing gets me going like stereotypical thinking, so i dropped the subject.  For some men his sort of attitude is a turn on, but not for me.  Yet we made plans to meet.  He knew Andy.

The Andy I had known was an exuberant, friendly freshman in high school.  He lived down the street from me and, like me, went to a fundamentalist, Jesus loving church (though not the same one).  We spent a lot of time bonding over Christian pop music on the bus and both fell in love with this little ditty:

Yes, i actually loved that song (it's not so bad) and even had a little dance routine to it.  (It was a strange time.  What can i say?)  Another quality we shared was our conspicuously friendly interest in females.  My memories of this period are elusive, but i remember that he was my best friend, my only friend, and it's possible that Andy was merely too nice to reject the bossy fat kid showering him with attention since, as with many things, i was relentless in my pursuit of his friendship.  It's more likely though that he felt as much of an affinity for me as i felt for him.

My path in life has often felt remarkably lonely.  A loneliness relieved now and then when i look to my left (or right) and see that there's someone traversing a path parallel to my own.  My path and Andy's aligned in ways far deeper than christian pop music fandom.   Both of us felt like outsiders and were haunted by troubles at home.  I had not had been cared for by my mother since I was seven; his mother suffered crippling chronic migraines, a malady she seemed to use as an excuse to shrink away from her children.  She often relied on Andy to help care for his many siblings; I was often saddled with caring for my step-siblings since my manic depressive father and stepmother were too busy rapidly deteriorating.  While our camaraderie of dysfunction failed to save us from our families it certainly made my path feel far less lonely.  It's nice having someone to wave to for a while, especially someone lovely as Andy was.  His handsome face and bubbling charm, his good natured openness were to me what the moon is to the tide.  What i really wanted was to hold him in my arms, but instead i strove to hold him accountable for his sins.  As his path veered away from mine, away from 'the lord', in a direction i feared, i strained to keep him near me by struggling to 'save him'.  In retrospect, my desperate attempts to keep him near likely pushed him further away.

The gay wrestling wonder's account of the Andy of today sounded familiar.  It seems that Andy is a bit of a party boy now.  Apparently the G-dubya Dubya and Andy lived together for a time, a time marked by theft, drugs, and discord, and were no longer in contact.  The story reminded me of Michael.  My best friend from age nine to fifteen and also my boyfriend.  Last time i saw Michael he was a strung out, homeless punk rocker standing before me, his black denim and leather cutting a slice of night out of a luminously sunny day, casting a bleak shadow upon the glowing, verdant Hyannis Village Green.  In the background a slick quartet of singers, a sort of gospel version of the Temptations, were belting away to a sparse, but enthusiastic, jesus loving crowd.  Michael had watched me introduce the singers on the bandstand.  And he appeared out of nowhere as i walked away from the podium.  I doubt i'll ever quake as furiously as i did in that moment ever again.  We hadn't seen each other for more than a year.  Our paths had diverged.  I had spent the summer of my seventeenth year planning a Christian cultural event called Cape Cod Outreach for Christ, an ambitious and grandiose thing for a seventeen year old.  Michael had spent his summer in the psych center, or so i'd heard.  We didn't speak for long, no more than ten minutes, probably far less, and i remember only but a single thing he said.  "I always knew you would be on stage someday."

I never saw him again.  We had been thick as thieves, but the gravity of our shared experience flouted its promise to keep our orbits aligned.  And if such gravity was not strong enough, our deep, but inexperienced love was certainly not either.  Though it did manage to hold a place for him within my heart.

I'm not sure why it upset me so much when G-dubya Dubya made me drive twenty minutes to meet him in a parking lot only to ditch me as quickly as he could, but i found myself foaming at the mouth.  I shouldn't have been.  I've experienced this before, not rarely, in my interactions with other internet personas, but this misfire aroused in me an immense rage, with an undercurrent of grief.  I reacted like a angered child, calling to leave a particularly nasty message and running home to 'block' him before he had the satisfaction of blocking me.  I am often shocked at my propensity for regression and this was a doozy.  But why?  Could it have been the crumbling of the bridge to my past our conversation had constructed that occurred as he drove away?  Or was it the cost of gas i had spent as i reasoned during my race home, the past and present roiling my mind?